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Press Release No. 6 | March 31, 2025

DFG to Fund Five New Research Units

Topics range from chiral phonons for spintronics to power and abuse in the Catholic Church / A total of approximately €19 million for the first funding period.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) is establishing five new Research Units. This was decided by the DFG Joint Committee on the recommendation of the Senate. The new Research Units will receive total funding of approximately €19 million, including a 22-percent programme allowance for indirect project costs. In addition to the five newly created Research Units, it was decided to extend four Research Units, one Clinical Research Unit and one Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences for an additional funding period. 

Research Units enable researchers to pursue current and pressing issues in their areas of research and take innovative directions in their work. They are funded for up to eight years. In total, the DFG is currently funding 190 Research Units, 11 Clinical Research Units and 18 Centres for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Clinical Research Units are also characterised by the close connection between research and clinical work, while Centres for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences are specifically tailored to forms of work in the humanities and social sciences.

The new research networks in detail

(in alphabetical order of the spokespersons’ higher education institutions)

How do power and abuse emerge, particularly in the Catholic Church? What defines this power, and how does it operate? These questions are the focus of the Research Unit Power and Abuse in the Roman Catholic Church – Interdisciplinary critique and analysis. The network will examine the topic from various perspectives – the people affected, institutional power in the context of legal frameworks, and the underlying power structures, i.e. the patterns and factors that enable, support and reinforce potentially abusive relationships. These three focal areas will be taken as a basis on which to investigate how institutional perpetrator-victim structures arise and why they are often hidden or taboo. The findings are also expected to be relevant beyond the Church and support efforts to prevent and address abuse. (Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Anja Middelbeck-Varwick, University of Frankfurt am Main)

Machine learning is already widely used in everyday life. But it poses new challenges in practice – such as how to ensure safety in autonomous driving or human-machine interaction. Traditional machine learning methods usually cannot guarantee safety, making new approaches necessary. The Research Unit Active Learning for Systems and Control (ALeSCo) – Data Informativity, Uncertainty, and Guarantees aims to develop fundamentally new approaches to active learning, where the learning process is continuously guided. Such strategies are essential to ensure safe, high-performing and data-efficient operation of complex and dynamic systems. To this end, the group will investigate not just what the system needs to learn but also when and how. The findings could have applications in fields such as robotics and energy systems. (Spokesperson: Professor Dr.-Ing. Matthias Müller, University of Hannover)

Proteostasis plays a key role in ensuring cell function and viability: it is a complex process that ensures proteins are produced correctly and function properly, or are broken down if they are faulty. This quality control relies on a network of pathways, but it has limited capacity. When the network fails, it can disrupt cell function and lead to metabolic, cancerous or neurological diseases. The Research Unit Cell Non-Autonomous Regulation of Organismal Proteostasis aims to uncover the molecular mechanisms behind the regulation of proteostasis in both healthy and diseased states. The network works on the assumption that proteostasis is regulated through exchanges between different tissues. Their goal is to understand how quality control pathways function across organs and respond to environmental and metabolic changes. (Spokesperson: Professor Dr. David Vilchez, University of Cologne)

Phonons – fundamental vibrations in a solid’s lattice – are typically classified as having either acoustic or optical properties. Recently, researchers have increasingly been studying the special characteristics of so-called chiral phonons in various areas of solid-state physics. The Research Unit Chiral phonons for spintronics_ChiPS investigates the physical properties of these chiral phonons in relation to magnetism and spintronics – that is, in connection with the electron’s spin. How can chiral phonons be generated, transported and detected? To answer these questions, the Research Unit will explore time and length scales at the atomic level that have not previously been studied. Their work aims to generate fundamental insights into phonons and possibly identify new spintronic applications. (Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Ulrich Nowak, University of Konstanz)

In language acquisition and processing, features that go beyond individual sounds play an important role – such as intonation, sentence melody, speech rate and rhythm and pauses. These elements are collectively known as prosody. The Research Unit Weak Elements in Phonology: Development, Processing, and Modality focuses on the role of phonologically weak elements, such as unstressed or reduced syllables. Up to now, (psycho)linguistic research has mainly focused on strong and prosodically prominent elements such as stressed syllables – such as the German words “Nase” or “kaputt” (in English “nose” or “decide”) – even though phonetically reduced forms like [ge:m] for the German word “geben” (in English “give”) are common in spoken language. This network incorporates perspectives from language processing, acquisition and change – in both spoken and written language – to address a gap in prosody research. (Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Ulrike Domahs, University of Marburg)

The research networks extended for a second funding period 

(in alphabetical order of the spokespersons’ higher education institutions and with references to the project descriptions in the DFG’s online database GEPRIS):

Further Information

Further information is also available from the network spokespersons.

Links to DFG Research Units:

Media contact

DFG Press and Public Relations
E-mail: presse@dfg.de
Telephone: +49 228 885-2109

Contact at DFG Head Office

Julie Martin
E-mail: julie.martin@dfg.de
Telephone: +49 (228) 885-2577

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